Watch or listen to episode 333 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Borja Sordo, North American Sports Practice Lead, Accenture.

Borja discusses why teams with some of the most elite analytics operations on the planet still run their front offices without the same rules of engagement, why turning a two-game fan into a four-game fan deserves champagne, whether watching Drive to Survive makes you an F1 fan, how to monetize fans who will never set foot in your stadium, why lifelong fans give teams a feedback loop most brands can only dream of, what the big leagues should learn from emerging leagues, why every experiment needs an ROI behind it, and more.

Watch or listen to episode 330 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Bill Bailey, Chief Revenue Officer for Satisfi Labs.

Bill discusses what changed for conversational AI in sports when ChatGPT arrived and why LLMs improved the product instead of killing it, the guardrail work that keeps a team’s agent on-brand, his build-versus-buy rule (build your own internal tools, buy anything that touches a fan), the personalization ladder from a QR code on the suite level to a logged-in season ticket holder and where it turns creepy, why the real danger is questions going unasked rather than unanswered, how live escalation hands a fan to the right rep mid-game, what it means that team web traffic is leaking to ChatGPT, and more.

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73 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube

Watch or listen to episode 331 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Phil Andrews, CEO, USA Fencing.

Phil discusses why membership and not medals is the number he watches most closely, why participation comes before fandom in a sport built on doing rather than watching, why coming from outside the sport is a feature and not a bug, why awareness never converts without someone to walk a newcomer into a club, how the mask makes the most cinematic sport in the world also the most marketable, what Mandy Patinkin and a Creator Showdown deliver that $50 million in ads cannot, how USA Fencing earned the most CNN appearances in Paris, the business and operation of a sport’s national governing boy (NGB), and more.

99 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube

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Watch or listen to episode 329 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Andrew Taylor, Senior Manager of Club Social Strategy for the NFL.

Andrew has worked across a variety of sports: a pro baseball team in Adelaide, Australia, then MLB, the NBA, four years at Greenfly, and now the NFL. We get into why social touches everything and content distribution strategy, the helmets-off content that outperforms everything else across NFL clubs, how a fan actually gets built from a food video to a game, why follower count is a barometer and not a KPI, and what selling baseball to Australia taught him about the NFL’s push abroad.

THE 13-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE PODCAST!

111 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube

Watch or listen to episode 328 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Dave Benson, Founder & CEO, SuperQuickQuestion.

Dave Benson has sat in a lot of seats: ESPN, Bleacher Report, MLB’s Fan Cave, and a marketing run at IBM, before founding SuperQuickQuestion, the one-on-one, one-minute video meet-and-greet platform. We get into why the meet-and-greet has barely changed since our dads’ day, the eye-opening reality that 60% of contracted athlete appearances never actually happen, how a hard one-minute clock makes athletes MORE willing to say yes, the death of the shill post, and why the smartest, most nascent leagues treat fans as assets instead of threats. Packed with stories, real numbers, and takeaways for anyone working in fan engagement.

73 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube

Watch or listen to episode 327 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Joe Farren, Innovation Consultant, Future Sport Co.

Joe Farren has sat in a lot of seats: six years at Hawk-Eye, leading the innovation unit at Manchester City, and now running his own consultancy, Future Sport Co. We get into the Man City Roblox playbook that drove 55 MILLION unique players (and 6,000 new members in four hours), why 3D player tracking data could one day rival media rights, and the fan behaviors that outlast every tech hype cycle. Loaded with case studies and real numbers.

106 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube

Watch or listen to episode 326 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Ben Valenta, EVP of Strategy and Analytics at Fox Sports and co-author of Fans Have More Friends.

Ben discusses how he came to see fandom as a “belonging engine,” and why the real definition of a fan is “passion plus action” (which his team measures through what they call a value score). He breaks down why it’s far easier to grow the fans you already have than to convert non-fans (the 0-to-1 problem), why fandom is horizontal rather than vertical so your next fan is already a fan of something else, and how youth fandom actually takes root through repetition and family bonding rituals. He also gets into the most underrated metrics in sports media, the wellness research at the heart of the book (the bigger the fan, the happier and more connected), the difference between strong-tie and weak-tie fandom online, and the Greg Armstrong story that reframes what a season ticket is really for.

75 minute duration. Listen on Apple, Spotify and YouTube